Curtain Call: The Ink Runs Dry

by | May 20, 2014 | Blog

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What happens when The Ink Runs Dry? Fortunately, the House of SpeakEasy has a talking cure. We’re delighted to welcome Jonathan Alter, David Gilbert, Christopher Mason, Jay Parini and Amanda Vaill to City Winery for another Seriously Entertaining literary cabaret, taking in tortured geniuses, presidential candidates, messiahs and more. Read on, dear friends, to meet this month’s line-up.

alterJonathan Alter is an award-winning author, reporter, columnist, and television analyst. A veteran of nine presidential elections, his latest work has dissected the Obama White House, first in The Promise: President Obama, Year One (2010) and most recently in The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies (2013), which we reviewed here. His other books include The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope (2007).

Here Alter talks to the Washington Post about The Center Holds. “He’s very clear about needing to be president of all the people, and not the president of Black America. But he doesn’t like to talk about that too much in public… Because he’s African-American, the president can’t swing at every pitch that he wants to. Otherwise he plays into the hands of his enemies…”

David Gilbert is the author of two novels, The Normals (2004) and & Sons (2013). The latter, a witty and brilliantly observed examination of a reclusive novelist and his familial relations, was named a book of the year by The New Yorker, the Washington Post and the Guardian. John Irving said of it, “the writing is gorgeous — not only the prose but the power of David Gilbert’s observation”. Read our review of & Sons here.

Here Gilbert talks about dyslexia, the myth of fathers, and what writing has taught him.

Christopher Mason is a journalist, author, photographer and composer and performer of satirical songs. He’s performed for, amongst others, President Clinton, the Prince of Wales, and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. His journalistic and authorial career includes many pieces for the New York Times and the internationally acclaimed The Art of the Steal, which tells the inside story of the Sotheby’s-Christie’s price-fixing scandal.

Here’s Mason delivering one of his specialties, the occasion a fiftieth birthday party: “This bizarre allegation she’s fifty / Seems an odd cognitive disconnect / ‘Cause what makes her so thoroughly winning / Is her childhood’s not quite over yet…”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTsVhJVNjDQ

Jay Parini has written or edited dozens of books. A poet, novelist, biographer and critic, his catalogue includes Promised Land: Thirteen Books That Changed America (2008) and works on John Steinbeck and Robert Frost. He has often combined biography with fiction, as in The Last Station: A Novel of Tolstoy’s Final Year (1990), filmed in 2009 with Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren, and The Passages of H.M.: A Novel of Herman Melville (2011).

His most recent book, Jesus: The Human Face of God (2013), which we reviewed here, is a masterful synthesis of historical evidence and scriptural analysis. Here Parini talks to PBS NewsHour about “the gradually realizing kingdom of God”.

New York native Amanda Vaill is a biographer, journalist and screenwriter. Her new book, Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), published in April, has been acclaimed as “a vivid, well-paced story” by the Wall Street Journal. Her previous books include Somewhere: The Life of Jerome Robbins and Everybody Was So Young — Gerald and Sara Murphy: A Lost Generation Love Story.

Here she talks about Ernest Hemingway and the genesis of her latest work: “He wrote, ‘You could learn as much at the Hotel Florida in those years as you could learn anywhere in the world’. And when I read this line, I thought, That’s a book! And it was… The hotel itself became a sort of metaphor for Spain in the years from 1936 to 1939 when a desperate war was going on for the fate of the country.” Read our review of Hotel Florida here.

You can buy tickets for The Ink Runs Dry, which is at 8pm (doors from 6pm) at City Winery NYC on May 20, here.

Jay Parini and the Gradually Realizing Kingdom of God

by | Apr 30, 2014 | Blog

IJay Parini emphasize throughout what I call the gradually realizing kingdom of God — a process of transformation, like that of an undeveloped photograph dipped in chemicals. The process itself adds detail and depth to the image, which grows more distinct and plausible by the moment.

— Jay Parini, Jesus: The Human Face of God (New Harvest/Amazon Books, 2013)

I’d always assumed that I probably knew only the bare outline of “what we know” about Jesus Christ. Born poor in Bethlehem, he’s later hailed as the Messiah; he performs some brilliant miracles and preaches the word of God; he annoys the Romans and is crucified for it; he finally returns from the dead in an act that also betokens the salvation of humankind. But reading Jay Parini‘s new biography, Jesus: The Human Face of God, I realise that the “story” bit is just the beginning. In eight chapters, Parini introduces his ancient setting and takes us through what is known or surmised about Christ from his nativity through to the Resurrection and beyond. Along the way he teases out the many possible interpretations of Jesus’ famous teachings. He ends with a useful discussion of “the evolution of thinking about Jesus”, from Paul’s letters through the so-called “quest for the historical Jesus” and the Jesus Seminar. Historiography itself plays in to Parini’s project, which is, broadly, an attempt “to see Jesus steadily and whole through the kaleidoscopic lens of many texts”. It’s in this methodological approach that the great value of the book emerges.

I’d forgotten that Jesus, now very much the Establishment, was once a highly disruptive figure. It’s hard to imagine his most famous teachings — all essentially peaceful entreaties — sparking much controversy. Yet shocking they were, coloured by the “continuously pressured, anxiety-filled historical context of Jews under Roman rule”. Parini’s skill lies in his ability to enable the reader to hear again through the ears of a native of Palestine circa 30 CE. Throughout his career, he writes, “Jesus continued to press against the boundaries of taste and received wisdom, angering many who heard him, setting the stage for his eventual arrest and execution”. He quotes T.S. Eliot in “Gerontion”: “In the juvescence of the year / Came Christ the tiger.”

Jesus - The Human Face of GodJesus’ historical-political moment is pivotal. He lived in a multicultural society in which a predominantly Jewish populace was ruled over by an empire with laws and notions of its own. Even within Jewish society, there were many factions: the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Essenes, the Zealots… Each shaped Jesus in different ways, even if he came to be defined by his difference. Palestine’s location was important, too, not least in the development of Jesus’ philosophy. Living on the Silk Road, “he would have encountered Hellenistic notions of the soul’s immortality that poured in from the West, from Greece and Rome, and felt the heady winds of mysticism blowing from Persia and the East”. Indeed, as Parini points out, one of the central tenets of Christ’s message, “the notion that we ultimately reap what we sow”, is a Karmic belief, derived from Buddhism. On top of all this, Palestine at the dawn of the Christian Era was a land of many languages — several of which, Parini asserts, would have been familiar to Jesus.

Language is central to Parini’s book. Arguably the centrepiece of the work is his dissection of Jesus’ teachings. And at the heart of his interpretations are the linguistic challenges posed by the gospels. Take “Blessed are the meek”. In English meek means “timid, frightened, even foolish”. The Greek original, though — praÿis — is used by Aristotle to mean “somebody who understands the golden mean, who picks a way between anger on the one hand and subservience on the other”. Parini also suggests a translation of “nonviolent” or “peaceful”. In another of the Beatitudes — “Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness” — the meaning hinges on a nuanced understanding of its final term. In Greek, righteousness/dikaiosuné “suggests a yearning for oneness with God, a conjunction of wills”, rather than any kind of ethical quality. Throughout these illuminating asides, and many similar, I was reminded of the critical discussions of the meaning of timshel in Steinbeck’s East of Eden, another work which reveals the beauty of belief in the service of understanding and literature as a tool of enlightenment.

Indeed, I’d argue that Parini’s Jesus can be read throughout as a celebration of literature and open-mindedness. His Christ is a figure seen from many angles, an elusive but vivid four-dimensional creation. His notion of the “gradually realizing kingdom of God” is founded in religious experience as a process of contemplation and continual revelation, as well as close textual analysis. Parini is not a literalist but neither does he deny his belief in the literalness of some of Jesus’ miracles. It’s hard not to agree with him when he quotes Oscar Wilde on those who would be “always degrading truths into facts”; finding what is valuable in Jesus’ life needn’t linger on the fetishes of traditional history or biography.

Overall, the Resurrection represents, for me, a joy that is probably diminished by a reading of this event that fails to embrace the mystical aspect, the idea that the transfigured body of Jesus defies human comprehension.

And this is perhaps where the beauty of religion lies, at the meeting point between literary criticism, imagination and the human need for faith.

You can purchase a copy of Jesus: The Human Face of God at McNally Jackson here. Jay Parini is our guest at the House of SpeakEasy’s next Seriously Entertaining literary cabaret, “The Ink Runs Dry”, at City Winery on May 20. Buy your tickets here.